On the way to your wedding & American Metaphor, 16th and Mission BART, San Francisco

On the Way to Your Wedding

The limousine drove behind a truck full of cattle on their way to slaughter.

I could see their faces out the window. The smell of hay and dried dirt

permeated our serenely air-conditioned vehicle. I tried not to think about

what kind of metaphor it might be, what it might augur for your union.

Later, at the reception, we stood around the fire, and I wondered if my friends could smell the death on me.

American metaphor, 16th and Mission BART, San Francisco

Rats live

in the sculptures

relief chiseled in white

shit-stained from birds,

piss-stained from men.

The rats move in and out,

so slow you forget

what kind of animal they are.

//

Emily Pinkerton (she/they) is a writer with very severe disabilities. They live and write in the San Francisco Bay Area. She holds an MFA from San Francisco State University, and their writing has previously appeared in Pome, ZYZZYVA, Juked, BlazeVOX, Foglifter, and Berkeley Poetry Review, among others.

Emily is the author of three chapbooks: Natural Disasters (Hermeneutic Chaos Press, 2016), Bloom (Alley Cat Press, 2018) and Adaptations (Nomadic Press, 2018; Black Lawrence Press, 2023). Her full-length collection, All Hazards, was selected as a finalist for the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and a semi-finalist for the Brittingham and Felix Pollak Poetry Award. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies from The Writers Grotto and Alley Cat Books in San Francisco, and USF Verftet in Bergen, Norway.

More of Emily's publications can be found at thisisemilypinkerton.tumblr.com, on Bluesky (@poetryfriend), or on instagram (@thisisemilypinkerton).